Every time I walk
Into an alley plunged in black sunlight
I remember old women from my childhoods

Their long dresses
Their crepe skin that amazed me
The tiny flowers in the bowl of their faces
The black shawls when they worked
Their meadows, their fields and gardens
Silence that contained only answers of
Those old women plunged in sunlight

And from my first childhood
And circle of sunlight in the flower garden
And the daisies grown higher than my head
And my mouth that went through the fence
To kiss the mouth of the curly girl next door
And the magnified grasses when I lay
My face on the earth's soil

And in my next childhood
And the one that came after my first
And was consumed with isolation and with
the insane pursuit of premature
sanity

The one I spent schooled in order
that torn childhood when line and colour
were forcibly parted from language

In this new and easily come-by childhood
Every time I walked through an alleyway
held tight in the drizzles of soft rain

Every time this happened I
remembered the old women of
my childhoods

My aunt from
the city of china and canals
pottering in her goods yard
craving snowdrops from coal
kettles from coal-dust

Look!
She's bringing out the tin
bath to sud out all her bulges:

She who played
cricket with me in the garden
and read me bed-time stories

My grandmother in her long dress
Standing in the sun of another country
Standing in the militancy of her mildness

Standing like an alley plunged in light
A route to the future and not the past
In her lucid disregard for good sense

And my mother who
By the time of my third childhood
Had entered the last years of her own
And already herself was old

My mother then
I thought of almost as a child
Shopping for fresh pasta and winter coats
With her father in the shops of Frith
Street

And in those years
I carried her once in my arms
Up steep meadows to the mountain hut
And cooked for her as she for years
Had done the same but more
for me

And in my third childhood
the one that comes before the fourth
the one that is predicated on all the sanities
of madness
on all that is disreputable and indissoluble
& protests and proteins timed on youth

And in my final childhood
And that of the insanity I have yet to attain
Whenever I hobble into alleys of sunlight
And whenever I walk through walls
Through their non-existent holes
Into the drivel of words and
the palaver of farewells

I remember the old women
Of my childhoods and my early years
And of all the years I have put together
Shattered in alleys & plunged in black light

And when I dribble my goodbyes
And when I forget the arts of parting
I think back on my grandmother
Held between nutmeg and mountain birds
Held between polenta and a fistful of cloves
Held just where history exploded her

And in the later years
Those when the afterbirths of childhood
Had been thrown aside and not wrapped round
To heal memory or poultice political wound ...

And when the line of white on
My unshaven face is like a brittle field
Of hoar-frost with pecking birds

In those later years
I want to think back on the lives of
old women I have known ...

My grandmother
standing amazed and certain in her
superb seventeen years beauty

My grandmother standing
out of sepia with her eldest children
dressed in white for the camera
my mother also standing and
looking out through thick thin
turbulents of brown time

My grandmother
Leaning on her leaning stick
On the arm of my aunt
The amazed compassion of her youth
Still smiling from out her face ...

Is that what is meant by migration?

A smile moving from one face to another ...

My grandmother
Was an economic migrant in time of war
Losing two babies at the border post
To the fiction of disease and
Unnecessary papers

Is that what is meant by asylum?

I also with my words plunder matter:

Am I then master of what matters?

Or old women
I knew in the Western Isles
Who never in their lives left their island
Nor even one township of it nor
Hardly even a hearth

But for summer pasture on the shieling moors ...

Or to handle herring on other eastern shores
Fingers cold-charred with gluey fish-scales ...

And yet the candour of their mouths
And yet the clamour of their justice ...

Or in my next childhood
And in my last but one when I had learnt
To count by a different system through this life
Through this stubborn uninhibiting uninhabitable
festering of breaking things

When even breath had become a betrayal
And language was a midden-heap of maggots
and worms

Or in the final childhood I will never attain
When we come to realise all the beautiful insanities
of compassion

And I managed fully to lose my sanity
Only whilst fully managing to retain it

And in this way I was able to walk again
Into the dark alleys of black sunlight